Promotion of solar power generation is booming. After analyzing a few of these announcements one is left with rather a few questions. Why are solar farms built when financial information clearly show that solar power is still the most high-priced electricity generation technology accessible?
Solar power plant developers and marketers certainly know that they need to have to lower expenses. Cost reduction is, however, costly and takes time. A lot of new enterprises have been formed and want to turn out to be profitable when the massive construction boom in solar power plants will hit the road. In the meantime they must pay bills, advance their technologies, and stay alive.
There are two key technologies for solar energy conversion. 1 approach is based on the conversion of sunlight into heat and making use of the heat for the generation of steam. This idea has progressed to a reasonably high readiness level. Electricity production with steam is a quite mature technology. Remaining technical risks, consequently, relate exclusively to the style of the thermal concentrators or parabolic mirrors that optically transfer thermal radiation to a heat transfer medium and to the style of the heat receiving transfer and steam containment surfaces.
The other technology is the direct, photovoltaic conversion of sunlight into electricity. This technology will most likely turn out to be the dominant solar electric power generating technologies – eventually. The huge question for investors and for marketers is the uncertain duration of “eventually”. Converting sunlight directly into electricity is much more elegant and will practically definitely turn into less costly than thermal conversion – ultimately.
Very recently, IBM proposed a third concept, a kind of a hybrid approach. In this concept, the sunlight is concentrated onto a solar panel. This approach reduces panel location and saves lots of expensive silicon. But it generates another issue. The concentrated sunshine creates quite high surface temperatures on the solar panel. To save solar panel location and make the solar panel cost competitive, 1 ought to cool the surface of the solar panel quite efficiently to prevent it from melting and destruction.
Installing extremely successful cooling loops and offering a low temperature cooling medium presents a new set of technical challenges and expenses. We will have to wait and see how IBM will solve these issues.
Present production expenses for generating electricity with solar panels are hovering around .50 per kWh. This compares with an average US retail cost for electric power of .095/kWh. Right now, solar power does not however make economical sense.
All renewable energies share this distinction. None of the available technologies utilizing renewable energy can compete with the price of electricity generation from coal.
This is also 1 of several examples where free markets perform poorly. The technologies for generating electricity with solar power, wind power, marine power, and geothermal power are very nicely understood. What is missing is the industrial hardening of these processes and related hardware. This process of moving a technologies from the demonstration plant stage to a much more dependable and less expensive mature method status is the most essential, expensive, and harmful step when creating industrial systems, which must operate uninterrupted 24/7 for thousands of hours on end.
The US can’t reduce its carbon dioxide emissions and can’t accomplish energy independence with out employing renewable energies for electric power generation and for the critical production of liquid transportation fuels.
At present, a respectable number of windmill farms and solar panel farms are becoming installed. Forward thinking industrial and public entities take the liberty to impose hidden taxes on the consumers of electric power in industry, in commercial enterprises, and in homes.
Solar power does not make economical sense, but. Nevertheless, by offering an income guarantee for investors, the critical hardening and price reduction phase of full size solar farms will be shortened tremendously.
There is one inherent danger in this approach. The consumers of electricity pay for this most essential development phase while other participating parties make out handily. Successful controls for avoiding unproductive duplication of specific kinds of solar farms are sorely missing.
Duplication of experience is a lot much less valuable than gaining broad experience from competing technologies and installations. Nicely engineered solar power farms can indicate their readiness for more widespread applications soon after a couple of uninterrupted, full capacity, generation campaigns. At completion, qualified technologies leaders can begin to compete and can drive down total program installation costs by a selection of price reduction measures.
Where are we now? A random sampling of recent announcements of solar farm installations reveals that program installation expenses are in the 00 to 00 per kW installed capacity. These plant costs loosely translate into a cost of producing electric power at .30 to .60 per kWh. This really unfavorably compares to the cost of electricity generation by any other technologies.
These figures do not yet contain the expenses of energy storage. As long as solar power constitutes only a quite little fraction of overall electric power generation, the extra costs of storing intermittently produced electric power are not but of concern. If the US is going to depend drastically on the intermittent production of electricity from solar power and wind power, it must start to develop storage technologies for large amounts of electric energy. Frequent brownouts due to lack of wind and sunshine are unacceptable in advanced economies. Intermittent, renewable energies and electric energy storage are inseparable. This is a technologies field where inventors, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists still can shine.